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Localization Strategies for Your Business

It’s becoming hard to ignore the trend that businesses are going global today. The cost of expanding business nationwide and worldwide has significantly declined over the past decade. It’s not only a great opportunity for business to increase its market share, but a chance to lower business risks and smooth revenue fluctuation. In the process of globalization, none can deny the importance of localization, the process of adapting the business to the local market, which has become a key factor for businesses to thrive across different regions. Here we provide some strategies that may be helpful for your company to localize your business:

1. Modify your products or launch new products to adapt to the local market

People’s tastes and preferences vary across different regions; if you can have the right products tailored to their needs, you are more likely to thrive in that market. McDonald’s, with its restaurant chains all over the globe, is adept in creating new menu items that better match the taste of the local people. It offers soup in Portugal, provides a greater variety of vegetarian meals in India, and sells macaroons in France. Even within in the U.S., in its effort for localization, it has limited-time special menu items in certain cities. Sometimes you can buy lobster roll in McDonald’s around Boston.

2. Present the right value proposition to the local people

Even when you decide to sell your goods in different markets, try to customize the message and present the key advantages the local people may value. In a different market, the comparative advantages of your goods may differ, and you may sharpen and present a different value proposition to people in different areas. H&M, the multinational clothing retail company, is tailoring its message when marketing for the same product. It features on the designing concept of the clothes in certain areas while emphasizing on the material and manufacturing process when it sells the clothes in different markets.

3. Improve the speed and performance of your website and online contents

Your online infrastructure may lag behind when you try to reach a larger group of people. If it’s going to take a person more than 10 seconds to load your website, that person probably would leave your website and go to your competitor’s site. You may check out your loading time on an analytic site, and if you find that the speed is not desirable, you may consider setting up a Content Delivery Network, which helps deliver your website, pictures, videos, and other contents to the local people at an amazing speed.

4. Identify local needs and solve local problems

Each region has its own problems that need to be solved. If you can manage to solve those problems, you would have an unbeatable advantage to place your products or services in that market. Uber is known for identifying the needs of local people and developing functions and features that can better assist those people. It launched UberENGLISH, which makes it much easier for those who don’t speak English to take a ride even when the driver speaks English. Attracting more people who can’t speak English, it successfully improved its user experience and increased its market share overseas.

5. Provide great contents in marketing campaigns

In the marketing campaign, it’s crucial to provide contents either informative or entertaining to attract your prospect customers. However, people in different areas have different cultures, and contents informative or entertaining in one place may not be so elsewhere. When launching a marketing campaign targeting a different group of people, make sure you have done some research on their culture and make sure your contents would attract them.

There’s no universal strategy for all the businesses to thrive in different areas, but if you stay tuned to the local culture and what the local people value and seek for when they shop your product and service, you may get a cue. But to begin with, don’t ignore the importance of the language. Localization is not only about language, but the language is the building block on which great messages are created and delivered. At Alliance Business Solutions, we are ready to provide you with the best translation and interpreting services to assist you with your localization strategies, and our mission is to help propel your business to the next level.